The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (12 page)

“The girl’s body is no figment of a psychopath’s warped imagination.”

“No, but she could have been killed by someone else.  Or, if Soto did do it, how could it be connected to Molly and Elizabeth?”

“Blame it on the Grey Goose, I don’t follow you, Sean.”

“What if the girl found today saw something that Soto also thought Molly and her boyfriend saw?  Then, there would be the common thread in this—something much deeper.  Whoever the kid in the grave was, with her broken wings and broken neck, she also could have stumbled upon whatever it was that Soto doesn’t want anyone to know about.”

“And, it simply may have been the girl’s body itself.  Soto might believe that Molly and her boyfriend saw the killing or saw him digging a grave.  They got in their car and left before he could silence them.  Maybe something delayed Soto from getting them before they left the forest.  So now he’s stalking to silence the only living witnesses to avoid a life behind bars.”

I said nothing.  Max closed her eyes, her chin resting on my thigh. 

Dave said, “Let the constables who patrol the forest track this guy down.”

“Have you and Kim been comparing notes?”

He half smiled, his eyes weighted with fatigue and vodka.  “Our little marina community looks out for its own.  Although you’re a part-time resident, you’re full time in our hearts, especially Kim’s.  Maybe you’ve noticed.  And Nick would lay down his life to save yours.  As for the two women in the Walmart parking lot, you were in the right place at the right, or wrong, moment.  You most likely saved their lives… but you aren’t on duty for life, Sean.  Another drink?”

“No thanks, I’m taking Max to bed.  Maybe I’ll sleep topside with her.  Watch the stars and the light from the lighthouse before the sandman comes.”

“Unfortunately, our safe harbor here isn’t as immune from demons as we’d like, especially the kind you’ve carried since the Gulf War and your wars on the streets of Miami.  As you watch that light shining out into the dark sea, it’s worth hearing something that you should or probably already know: Wherever light travels, it’s greeted by darkness, but light always comes again.”

TWENTY-SIX

My body wanted sleep.  My mind wanted resolution.  I could go down into the master berth, stretch out and try to drift off.  But I knew sleep would be elusive, my thoughts returned to the forest and the girl’s gravesite.  I sat on the couch in my salon, put my feet up on the old table and read.  Max curled into the center of the couch, her breathing slow and steady behind closed eyes.  After a half hour, I book-marked the end of a chapter, pulled my last Corona from the cooler and tried to ease out of the salon without waking Max. 

One brown eye popped open.  Then the other.  Now both little brown eyes, confused, or maybe looking at me in some kind of doggie disbelief suggesting I was an incurable insomniac.  She jumped from the couch, yawned and followed me to the cockpit.  We climbed the steps to the fly bridge.  She found her bed on the bench seat, and I found my nest in the captain’s chair.  I sipped a beer, rested my feet up on the console and felt the cool sea breeze sweep across by face.

I played the conversations back in my mind from the gravesite with Detective Sandberg and also with the district forest ranger, Ed Crews.  Sandberg making a reference to the girl’s broken neck.  Crews talking about spotting vultures circling, and seeing a man, an ex con, perhaps a squatter, walking down one of the roads, looking like he was leaving the forest.  Who was he?  And did he snap the girl’s neck… or was it Soto… or somebody else?  I sipped the beer and glanced over at Max sleeping.

Jupiter
swayed a little as the incoming tide pushed the current, the ropes around the cleats moaning a midnight snore.  The temperature was dropping, a mist beginning to rise over the bay waters.  I looked up and watched a cloud cover the moon’s bright face, the light fading as if a dimmer switch was slowly turned off.  Now the brightest light came from the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse.

I felt fatigue growing behind my eyes as I stared at the rotating beacon from the lighthouse.  The lamp beamed its signal to ships out in the Atlantic.  In this world of GPS navigation, the old lighthouse stood like a noble soldier offering a guiding light.  But beyond the curvature of the earth, beyond the horizon, it was dark.  And even if light from the aged tower could bend and reach its beam beyond the horizon, the dark was already there, waiting in a vast and infinite cloak of utter blackness.  Dave was right about that.      

SOMEWHERE IN THE OBSCURE shadows, I saw the featherless scarlet head of a turkey vulture.  The bird stared back at me, the nostrils large and round.  The immense black pupils in the center of the raptor’s yellow eyes looked beyond me as it flew.  Its wings outstretched, suspended on the air currents that delivered the odor of a decaying body like veiled campfire smoke rising.  A second and third bird joined the first in the circle of death, spirals growing closer as they descended.   

The birds dropped to earth alighting next to an unearthed, shallow grave.  They strutted, timid for a moment, then growing bolder, coming closer to the hole, the stench a command that the scavengers were powerless to resist.  The largest of the three birds was the first one to stand at the edge of the grave.  Its head was nothing but wrinkled pink skin, except for the fine, downy hair-like growth on its scalp and the white, curved beak.  The bird turned its head to one side, the mustard-yellow eyes examining its feast, the stink of regurgitated field mice on its talons. 

From behind a live oak, a large tree with gnarled bark and old carvings, two fairies darted toward the gravesite.  They were larger than the scavengers, their wings like moving rainbows as they hovered over the hole in the earth.  The vultures scurried backward, away from the grave.  At a distance of a few feet, the vultures wailed like donkeys braying in protest of a dinner denied. 

I AWOKE, MY NECK STIFF from falling asleep in the captain’s chair.  I looked at my watch: 4:17 in the morning.  The mist had enveloped the marina, and I could no longer see the lighthouse.  I could just see Max less than five feet from me. 

“Let’s go find a real bed,” I said, gently lifting her.  She grunted, her eyes blinking.  We crawled into bed just as rain began to fall, its rhythm against
Jupiter’s
deck a welcome cadence as I closed my eyes.  I pictured the old oak tree that the dream weaver had spun somewhere in my subconscious, the bark knotty and scarred.  I willed the images from my mind, scratched Max behind her ears and hoped sleep would return without dreams from the edge of places I no longer tried to understand.                    

TWENTY-SEVEN

At 7:03 a.m. my cell phone rang on the small table next to my bed.  Max, at the foot of the bed, poked her head out of a corner sheet, groundhog like.  She looked at the ringing phone and then turned her head to me as I picked it up and stared at the caller ID.  Morning light poured through the master birth porthole.

Detective Lewis said, “We picked up Soto.  Thought you’d want to know.”

I cleared my throat.  “Thanks.  Where’d you find him?”

“Tampa, last night.  Two sheriff deputies pulled him over for a burned-out brake light.  The deputies thought the guy looked like the BOLO photo we’d circulated.  They pulled up the image on their car computer and called for backup.  The deputies drew down on Soto.  Cuffed him without resistance.”

“What was he doing in Tampa?”

“Don’t know.  I do know he still had a black eye and the bruises you left on his face.”

“How about the tat?”

Lewis chuckled.  “It’s there.  A naked little fairy with big boobs, I’m told.  Soto will be back here in Seminole County today.  I’m sure the judge will hold him without bond ‘til we can sort this stuff out.”

“Maybe you can get a confession to the murder of the girl in the forest.”

“We’re working with Marion County S.O.  We’re gonna try.”

“Do Elizabeth and her daughter know?”

“Called Elizabeth Monroe right before I called you.  Take care of yourself, O’Brien.  This one’s in the bag.”  He disconnected.  I sat at the edge of the bed and attempted to put a solid hook into the line Lewis had just tossed to me.  Tampa?  Was Soto hiding there, keeping low or meeting someone?  If so, who and how could it be tied to the forest, if it was?  I felt a throb building above my left eyebrow.

“Come on, Max.  Let’s go find a patch of grass and something to eat. 

LUKE PALMER OPENED A CAN of sardines for breakfast, leaned back against a pine tree, and ate.  He watched a rabbit chewing clover in the undergrowth and thought about the body of the girl he’d seen.  Damn shame.  She was somebody’s daughter. 

He wondered what it would have been like to have a daughter.  Remembered his case, his “day in court,” so many years ago, the public defender smelling of whiskey, the judge smelling of bribes.  They’d cheated him out of a chance for daughters, sons… family.  Cheated out of ever having experienced love from a woman.  Real love from a real woman who could give her heart totally.  Jesus, what that must be like.  Too damn late.  How do you make sense out the senseless?  Out here, out in the wild, animals do what comes natural.  They are what they are.  Humans, well, that’s a different animal.  In the courts, the penal system is liars, cons and cheats… and they’re the ones on the outside.  Money talks, bad dudes walk and a poor man does forty for defending himself when a rich drunk comes at him with a knife. 

 Today he’d head a little farther northwest, stay close to the approximate area and see if he could hit pay dirt.  Place must have changed a hell of a lot since Ma Barker and her son hid the loot.  It had to be here.  Somewhere.

Maybe today would be the day.  Find it, get outta here, and help get a kidney transplant for Caroline.  If anything’s left, drink margaritas and enjoy life.

Somebody was coming.  He poured water on the small fire, kicked out the embers and stood behind foliage as he watched the car in the distance.  Same car.  Same dark windows.  But this time he could see the front window, the morning sun in the faces of three men.  Looked like a roughneck driving.  A younger, darker skinned man sat on the passenger side.  And someone, a man, was in the backseat.  As the car passed, the man in the backset lowered the window and tossed out the remains of a cigar.  He looked Hispanic, sideburns, black hair, a gold pinkie ring.

Palmer packed his gear and walked toward the dirt road.  There was a ghostlike swirl of something white to his left.  Almost didn’t see it.  Smoke.  Near the road.  He approached it and saw the cigar smoldering, a yellow flame curling through dry weeds.  Palmer stomped out the fire.  He looked down at the cigar—one end still wet from saliva and flattened with teeth marks.  He used his shovel to throw dirt on the stogie.  He shook his head and thought the most dangerous fuckin’ animal in the forest walks on two legs. 

TWENTY-EIGHT

I’d been working on
Jupiter
for five days, sanding, painting, and replacing zincs on the props when my phone rang for the first time.  I couldn’t remember where I’d last seen my cell.  I set a can of marine varnish down and picked up the cell from a dock chair.  Elizabeth Monroe said, “I just wanted to thank you for all of your help.  Molly and I are most appreciative to you, Sean.  Anyway, I’m glad they found Soto.”

“Maybe they’ll find the reason he attacked you two.”

“I’m praying.  I feel so much better knowing he’s behind bars with bond denied.”    

“He’ll stay there for a very long time if they can build a case against him with forensics in connection to the death of that girl.”

“I read her name in the papers, Nicole Davenport.  She was only seventeen.  Poor girl ran away from home.  The news said she lived in Connecticut with her parents until one day she left home with her boyfriend.  He returned after two weeks, but she apparently fell in with some cult and kept going.”

“Please give Molly my best.”

“I will.  She’s so excited.  The butterfly rainforest is doing a few new releases of some very rare butterflies.  She’s been so involved in all of them.  She came back yesterday from a release at the Myakka State Park somewhere south of Sarasota.  She’s doing one more tomorrow somewhere.”

“I’m glad to hear that.  We need a few more Molly Monroe’s in this world.”

She was silent for a few seconds.  “And we need a few more Sean O’Brien’s, too.  Look, please don’t think I’m being presumptive or somehow forward… but I thought maybe we could have dinner sometime.”

“What time did you have in mind?”

“Well, it’s not like my calendar’s full.  Whenever you have some free time.  No pressure just when you have a window—”

“How about Saturday night?”

“This Saturday night?”

“Happens in three days.”

“Yes it does… umm.  Sure, that will be fine.”

“I know where we can get some of the freshest red snapper you’ve ever tasted.”

“Where?”